Germany's Top Hospital: Half A Million Germans Experienced Serious Adverse Events after COVID-19 Vaccination
Serious AE's in 1 out of every 125 vaccinated; 40x underreporting factor for severe adverse events; government urged to take vaccine injury seriously, find solutions
Researchers at Charité Berlin, Germany’s top hospital and one of Europe’s largest, have announced a high rate of severe side effects lasting months or longer based on a survey of about 40,000 Germans. Some highlights:
Researchers estimate 8 serious side effects per 1,000 vaccinated people (1 out of every 125), compared to 0.2 per 1,000 estimated by the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI), which is Germany’s FDA and vaccine watchdog.
This equates to an underreporting factor (URF) of 40x, which is almost exactly the same as the VAERS URF estimated by Steve Kirsch.
The study’s lead researcher, Prof. Harald Matthes, MD, estimates that half a million Germans experienced serious side effects following vaccination. Survey findings indicate that up to 80% of people with severe reactions recover within 3-6 months, but for 20% the symptoms persist. This equates to 100,000 Germans currently suffering from long term serious side effects. That means 0.16% of people vaccinated are still suffering serious side effects over 6 months following vaccination.
This is a major embarrassment for the PEI, which has maintained all along that it is doing a thorough tracking of vaccine adverse events and denounced anyone questioning its numbers as dangerous anti-vaxxers.
Matthes calls on the government to take people claiming vaccine injury seriously and to provide dedicated outpatient care to the vaccine-injured, noting that most have been unable to find help in the current medical climate, which both strongly discourages talking about vaccine injury and is basically clueless about how to help the vaccine injured. He has also called for permitting doctors to discuss vaccine injury openly so that they can develop treatments without fear of being denounced as “anti-vaxxers.”
Matthes notes a strong similarity between many of the symptoms of so-called “long COVID” and vaccine injury and believes treatments for long COVID may be helpful in addressing vaccine injury. For more on this, see my presentation at PANDA’s open science meeting on a unified theory of susceptibility to COVID-19 and injuries from COVID-19 vaccines.
Germany has set up outpatient clinics devoted to long COVID, and the vaccine injured can turn to them for help. Problem: too many injured. From this article: “
The special outpatient clinic at the University Hospital in Marburg is a prominent example of this. The employees actually wanted to do research on Long-Covid, but now they mainly care for patients with severe vaccination side effects. Between 200 and 400 e-mails from those affected are now received daily in the Marburg special outpatient clinic, and the waiting list includes around 800 patients.
The problem here, however, is that demand far outstrips supply. "We need more outpatient clinics, they are far from enough," emphasizes Matthes in the MDR report. [Note that outpatient treatment in German is machine translated into ‘ambulances’ in English.]
This story is huge. It is akin to researchers at Harvard Medical School coming forward and announcing that the CDC was undercounting the serious adverse event rate by a factor of 40, that vaccine injury is real and the vaccine injured need to be taken seriously and treated, and that doctors need to be able to voice their opinions openly without fear of retribution so that treatments for the vaccine injured can be developed.
In this interview, Dr. Matthes is asked about Andreas Schöfbeck, the insurance company executive who was fired after raising his concerns about vaccine injury based on claims data:
“He should have said there is a clue here, but causality has yet to be verified. It wasn't entirely clear if he was speaking politically, or if he was just doing his due diligence and saying: Here's a signal that needs to be investigated further, please. That little differentiation cost him his job. But if you then look at how black and white is currently being painted in public and with what vehemence certain opinions are exchanged without there being any facts - then you realize how unfairly he was punished for something that maybe not quite was carefully worded.”
You can tell he is being very cautious in his choice of words, but one can hardly justify Schöfbeck’s firing on the grounds that he was not guarded enough in his statements. Anyway, I’d bet dollars to donuts that he would have been fired even if his statement was more carefully worded.
Curiously, Dr. Matthes says the 8 per 1,000 serious event rate “corresponds to what is known from other countries such as Sweden, Israel or Canada. Incidentally, even the manufacturers of the vaccines had already determined similar values in their studies." Is this true? My experience from Israel says it’s not. Perhaps there is some wiggle room, as according to this article, the study defines “serious events” as “symptoms that require medical treatment and last for several weeks or months.” As far as I know, no study or data out of Israel has tracked serious events by that definition. If anybody knows what data he is comparing to, in Israel or elsewhere, please let us know in comments.
Of course there are a lot of possible biases in the survey methodology. Unfortunately I was not able to find any details on the methodology of the survey, so a more complete discussion of that will have to wait for another time. One thing for sure: people who died from the vaccine can’t answer a survey, so the research has nothing to say on this issue.
Here are links to some of the articles I found on this story in the mainstream German press: 1, 2, 3, 4. Machine translation is more than serviceable. And here is a video (again in German) from a mainstream German broadcaster on vaccine injuries, including an interview with Dr. Matthes. No translation possible.
ADDENDUM MAY 14, 2021: COMMENTS FROM GEORGI ADD SOME IMPORTANT INFORMATION TO HELP US PUT THIS IN CONTEXT:
1. Unfortunately Prof Matthes is largely ignored or refuted in the media so the average german still believes that the shots are exceptionally safe. Newspapers and even the official TV broadcaster are 'fact-checking' his study and claiming it is BS: https://www.tagesschau.de/faktenfinder/corona-impfnebenwirkungen-101.html
This is just ridiculous - if the study was 100% the same but addressing long covid as opposed to vaxx injuries it would have been on the first page everywhere without any criticism.
2. The Charite is scrambling to distance itself from the findings and Prof Matthes
3. Scientists having opposing opinions are literally being intimidated: newly a state prosecutor has officially accused Prof Bakhdi of antisemitic claims, based on his critics of the Israeli covid politics. Complete nonsense, but the tactics is to show to other dissenting voices that they rather keep their mouths shut. Similar things happened also to other scientists, like Prof Kekule who was fired for some formal BS, and Prof. Hockertz who was attacked and found guilty based on some tax related issues in the past (https://tkp.at/2022/05/13/verfolgung-von-regierungskritikern-fortsetzung-folgt/).
4. The courts, especially the constitutional court, dismiss all motions against the lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
5. A CEO of a large insurance company, BKK ProVita, was fired after he sent an open letter to the PEI, with exactly the same finding - the vaccine injuries, as reported by the MD's insurance claims are orders of magnitude above the ones of the PEI.
6. The most depressing is that on the local elections the germans are reelecting the politicians that treated them like cattle during the last two years.
PS to my subscribers: I know I haven’t written anything in a long while. When I initially started this substack, I optimistically imagined I might write 1-2 articles per week. I have fallen far short of that and will to try to up my output. I am diligently working on several projects “behind the scenes” that I am hoping to publish in academic journals: 1) an article on censorship and suppression of heterodox views on COVID-19 based on interviews with scientists and doctors around the world who have experienced this; 2) an update of my analysis on safety signals from COVID-19 vaccines; 3) a statistical analysis of the causal relationship between covid-19 vaccination and mortality using state-of-the-art econometric techniques. I will publish here on some of those soon. If any of my paid subscribers feel they are not getting their money’s worth, you can go ahead and stop your subscription from auto-renewing. In any event I am basically re-investing your subscriptions by subscribing to substacks I view as particularly worthy.
Josh,
Great article! It is hard to know what is happening in Germany, so thanks.
Do not worry about not posting often enough. Post only when you have an amazing idea that passed your most rigorous and skeptical fact checks. This is what I am personally looking for on substack when I want to read something. I do not want to read low effort stuff posted with the purpose of posting at a given frequency.
This insanity has to stop. The guilty people will have to pay. After lots of strong signs of bad consequences they insist on vaccines mandates.